A Prophylactic Against Rhetoric

["David Goodman" <David.Goodman@liu.edu>]

It is easy to compose financial models in which OA will conserve the
present journal system, and even easier to compose ones in which the
opposite will happen.  All of these models are subject to the uncertainty
about which parties will exhibit conservative behavior, will exhibit
economically rational behavior, or will retain or not existing levels of
funding.

In truth, these factors are unknown. Previous changes in journal
publication pattern are not an exact analog, but they seem to show that
some publishers prove to have adapted to change better than others, and
that the role of libraries in choosing what to purchase is much less
critical than the role of authors in choosing where to publish.

I do not trust any projections, including the ones I make myself (and I
have always indicated this by giving a very wide range -- e.g. "Open
Access: what comes next after 2004"  
http://dlist.sir.arizona.edu/archive/00000685/)

If I were recommending action, I would recommend to any library that it
should keep its options open and its funds available; I would recommend to
any publisher that it gradually convert some journals to Open Access
Journals, and offer the maximum practicable amount of liberty to authors
wishing to post their articles; I would recommend to any funding agency
that it sponsor as wide a range of possibilities as its resources commit;
I would recommend to any rule-making body that it promote as much OA as
feasible, and I would recommend to any authors that they should publish in
a variety of channels, in ways which will bring them the maximum attention
and prestige.  The reader may have noticed that all these recommendations
are essentially the same.

I would oppose any effort to standardize requirements, any single method
of publishing, paying, or archiving, and would ignore the prescriptive
advice of any one person or group.  The plain truth is that nobody knows
what will happen.  It is not necessary to enquire whether those making
strong positive or negative statements truly believe them, or are making
them for tactical reasons only, or simply expressing as a certainty what
they wish (or fear).
 
Whatever their motives, no one has factual basis for such statements. They
can be best read by ignoring the rhetoric, and treating them all as
potentially interesting suggestions. They do not become any the more
likely by being repeated, no matter how emphatically, or any less likely
by being criticized, no matter how vehemently.

Remember, this is a field where the only constraints are that no publisher
can publish after it runs out of money, and that no library can spend more
money than it is allotted.  This is a field where the best established
result is that almost all authors would publish in the way they are
required to publish--and with this result announced as a major
breakthrough.

But I look forward eagerly to analyzing what will prove to have
happened--but not for the sake of seeing who was right or wrong, because
all prior experience predicts that we will all be mostly wrong.

Dr. David Goodman
Associate Professor
Palmer School of Library and Information Science
Long Island University
dgoodman@liu.edu

Rhetoric--the art of making the worse seem the better cause.